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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Reverse production systems are often comprised of several tiers with independent members competing at each tier. This research develops and designs a decision-making process for decentralized reverse production systems where each participant in the network determines its decisions in a self-interested way.
This dissertation includes three major parts. The first part develops a prototype model for a decentralized reverse production system with two tiers, collectors and processors, focusing on the coordination of transactions of recycled items between these two tiers. The collectors determine the individual material flow allocation mechanisms that relate the flow amount to the overall vector of acquisition prices that are determined by the processors. The processors compete for the flow from the collectors and reach an equilibrium state where no entity is willing to change its decisions.
In the second part, we extend the prototype model for a general multitiered recycling network comprised of the upstream boundary tier, several intermediate tiers, and the downstream boundary tier where each of tiers is with multiple independent entities. Recycled items flow from the top tier to the downstream tier but acquisition prices are set from the downstream tier back to the upstream tier.
Finally the third part provides a comparison of centralized and decentralized models for reverse production systems and addresses several numerical insights of different system subsidy schemes.
